March 14, 2004

LISTENING

to:

My Bloody Valentine, 'Loveless': driven to rediscover this by Shields interview on Friday, and what a rediscovery. If anything, it is more arresting, entrancing, enveloping than ever. Anti-climactic drone 'rock': each track a plateau, beyond tension-release. Honeyed wooziness. Bleary clarity. Blurred and lucid.

Fantastic Ruff Squad tape from Luka . Another series of plateaus of a wholly different kind.

i second that - one of the greatest and most lasting testaments to 'indie' or whatever you want to call it, this is another of those albums that creates its own genre.
I still remember the first time I heard it, and saw the video for the single, and actually felt physically sick!

Posted by: undercurrent at March 15, 2004 11:23 AM

Goes without saying that its influence is still huge, but sometimes artists take it too literally. For example, Joy Zipper's new LP - I overheard it in Rough Trade today - is a straight facsimile of the sound with the odd US alt-country motif chucked in.

I think we could almost measure how good a band is by how bad their influence is; the better and more groundrbeaking the band the more slavish imitators they breed. Although as per Mark Sinker's comments (repeated here: k-punk.blogspot.com/2003_06_15_k-punk_archive.html) perhaps it's wrong to conceptualize this relationship in terms of influence at all.